Location update: Please note that this class takes place at Off Broadway
From the infamous pea soup of The Exorcist (1973), through to the almost unwatchable (and multiple) oral discharges of Drag Me to Hell (2009), the vomiting scene in contemporary horror cinema is an almost exclusively female trope. In recent years, feminine emesis has spewed beyond the abject enclosure of horror and into other genres, from vomiting housewives in Mad Men and Big Little Lies, to the 15-minute maritime puke fest in Triangle of Sadness. The trope has even been the object of mainstream discourse in publications such as Vulture and The Guardian.
Watched closely (if queasily), it’s clear that there’s more going on in these scenes than mere shock value, gross-out comedy or unimaginative screenwriting in search of a physical signifier of anxiety. What are all these vomiting women trying to tell us?
For female characters in horror, vomit is closely interlinked with their status and struggles in the family, workplace or social realm, particularly when it comes to communication. Wherever women in horror films throw up, certain speech-related motifs are reliably present: ‘modulation’ (speech that is practised or altered), ‘verbal violations’ (speech that shocks and offends), ‘communication problems’ (speech that is thwarted or misunderstood) and ‘the unspoken’ (speech that mustn’t be spoken at all). If on-screen vomit is more than just a bodily function, then could it actually be an extension of language? Might it be a demonstration of what happens when language fails and characters regress to alternative forms of expression?
This talk will explore vomiting female characters in horror films using the linguistic and cinematic theories of Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Barbara Creed. Through the lens of concepts such as the abject, the symbolic and the semiotic, the class aims to throw up alternative interpretations of films such Drag Me to Hell, Jennifer’s Body and The Ring, and give participants an understanding of the connection between vomiting women in horror and the female struggle to speak.
Sarah Kathryn Cleaver is a London-based researcher, writer and editor. She has written about film and culture for publications including Curzon, SHOWstudio, Dazed and The Final Girls. She runs Zodiac Film Club, a London-based independent curatorial project with a focus on good-looking films, complex female characters and overlooked genres. She has programmed films at London Short Film Festival, The Castle Cinema, The Garden Cinema among others, and collaborated with organisations including Girls in Film, T A P E Collective and Invisible Women.
